Jonathan Lampel shares what he thinks is the most important aspect of good Blender (or any) art. Let us know if you agree!
Jonathan writes:
Ever wonder what separates the best renders from the average ones? It's all about the right use of visual shapes, lines, color, and attention to detail. Learn how to apply the abstract concepts of design to improve your rendering in any software. My work is definitely not perfect, but this little tip has helped me to drastically improve my approach to 3D art.
Further reading:
18 Comments
I've been meaning to learn more about this subject lately, thanks for the presentation. I liked you analogy to playing the piano, since I was also feeling like the subject created restrictions--I had not considered the angle you proposed.
Yeah, it's interesting to see a continue! Although this theme was spotlighted on BCookie (or BGuru???) already, it will be interesting to listen another great explanation.
I really found your video talk
interesting, and I agree with you completely, however I would take it
a tad bit further. I think one of the biggest problems is that a lot
of these people that are working in Blender and 3D art are lacking in
something which includes “Composition”, and that is just overall
basic design fundamentals. I see it time and again, very talented,
creative people, who get everything right technically, but when it
comes to good design, they have no knowledge, and it ends up turning
what could have been phenomenal work, into great technical modeling,
but really bad choices in design and composition.
There are so many resources that
you can learn about the fundamentals of design, color theory,
lighting techniques, scene composition, etc. I really find it sad
that these people skipping the fundamentals and just jumping into
modeling and putting their (mostly very talented) models into scenes
that just ruin what could have been an outstanding, eye catching
piece of art.
I'm 50 years old, so when I was
young, and interested in a career in art, there was no Computer Art
available. I wanted to become a Graphic Designer, we had to start
with Basic Design, and work on from there. Most people would
probably laugh at some of the subjects we had to study back then, for
example, one of them was typesetting. I'm talking about actually
setting your own metal type. (It's amazing the speed at which all of
this has changed). This was college in the early 1980's. As funny
as it sounds, it gave me a solid foundation in which to build on with
my artistic skills.
Unfortunately, my career in art
never happened. Life's obligations happened Later a series of
injuries caused me to become disabled, which has set me back about 20
years. Despite my disabilities, I'm still passionate about art, and
I am still studying, this time I'm starting over with Blender, Gimp,
Inkscape, MyPaint, etc.
For those people who are starting
out, who have no background knowledge in design, I urge you to follow
Mr. Lampels advice. If it's just going to the library and reading a
book, or getting resources from online. You cannot make consistently
excellent renders without the foundation knowledge. You might be
able to get lucky and start-out OK, but the further you get into it,
your lack of knowledge of the fundamentals is going to start showing
through. If your trying to break into the field as a professional, I
would bet that your not having this foundation will either prevent
you from obtaining the jobs you are seeking or eventually sink you.
I wasn't aware this forum had changed
to include critiques on others writing styles. Thank you for making
me feel so welcome with my first post.
Hey Timothy,
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see anyone criticizing your comment? What's wrong?
I'm guessing Timothy is referring to Disqus' facility for upvoting comments. Which I did, incidentally.
Bart, First Off, I'm new to this forum, I've tried to reply to you 2x prior to this. I sincerely apologize if you get bombarded, but nothing showed up acknowledging the prior replies.
After entering my post, I returned sometime afterwards just to check up on the forum. The only additional comment at that time was Lawrences D'Oliveiros reference that I had "PowerPointed" (with link to article explaining the meaning, which you can read if you care to) and Zzzzzz. I don't consider this to be welcoming or constructive criticism. I don't want to make a big deal out of this, but if he thought my post was long and boring he simply should have stopped reading it and go on. Posting a gouge about it was completely unnecessary.
Hi Timothy!
Ah, I see what you mean - if you look closely at this page you'll see that replies to you are indented. Lawrence's reply wasn't aimed at you, but at Jonathan!
I'm very sorry for the misunderstanding on my part and I appreciate you tending to the matter in such a timely fashion.
No worries at all!
Hi Timothy,
Thanks for that, it was really encouraging!
Thank you, I appreciate your response.
Congratulations! You’ve just been PowerPointed!
Zzzzz....
Very good point !
Thanks a lot.
There is a wrong dot added in the web adress of ctrl.paint.com. The right adress is: ctrlpaint.com without any dot after ctrl.
Heya, I'm not sure where you're seeing that link, the post is showing the correct one as far as I can tell.
In the video, at 5:34 it is wirtten Ctrl.paint.com instead of Ctrlpaint.com Hope that helps.
Oh, I thought you meant in the post. I'm afraid I can't change the video :)